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enterprise grade cloud management

Core PlatformCapabilities

Enterprise Cloud Management

Platform for IT Governance

and Security

Agility Platform is a fully integrated cloud

management platform consisting of

multiple product modules, cloud

adapters, command line interface, SDK,

and a robust API. The core, underlying

platform includes governance, security,

and orchestration capabilities that are

consumed by each product module,

exposed via API, and implemented via

adapters for all the cloud workloads and

environments under management. Core

platform capabilities include:

An extensible policy engine enabling

the creation and enforcement of an

unlimited range of custom

governance, security and compliance

policies.

An end-to-end cloud-based security

model spanning network, instance,

data, and access levels including

federated identity management.

An orchestration engine for

deploying complex, multi-tier

HOME AGILITY PLATFORM™ SOLUTIONS SERVICES & SUPPORT

CLOUD IT TRANSFORMATION RESOURCES ABOUT US

The Agility Platform

provides a single pane of

glass of abstraction that

allows you line of sight

from the application, to the

service, to the

infrastructure;

theoretically the entire

stack. Once you have that,

the whole commoditization

of software as a services,

true pay by the drink, true

cost transparency, that’s

where it’s headed.

SVP of IT, Global Consumer

Products Company

”

My vision for this

organization is to enable us

to compete for any

business we want against

any competitor, and give

them all the tools

necessary for them to win

that business. And that’s

what we’re doing.

Vice President, Global Debit and

Credit Card Processor

“

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business applications across

heterogeneous public and private

clouds.

An API, cloud adapter SDK, CLI and

workflow automation capabilities to

extend cloud operating model

capabilities to existing IT ecosystems

and software development tool

chains.

Centralized management,

orchestration, and governance across

hybrid clouds, enabling enterprises to

optimize workload placement

decisions and establish vendor

contestability between cloud

services.

A purpose-built platform that

minimizes operational complexity

and provides proven scalability that

supports tens of thousands of

workloads under management.

Extensible Policy-Driven

Governance

Organizations require fine-grain cloud

management tools and cloud governance

controls to manage the complexity and

mitigate regulatory and compliance risk

inherent in today’s global enterprises.

There are countless potential

permutations of policy controls required

for enterprise cloud applications and

platforms that address ownership, user

permissions, regulatory compliance,

operating parameters, service level

agreements, financial controls,

geographic constraints, resource

availability, and much more. Organizations

need a single control point for enterprise-

wide cloud governance, compliance, and

security that is powerful and flexible

enough to address their current and

future cloud strategy needs.

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Application Centric CloudGovernance Policies

When the unit of self-service

provisioning is the application or

application platform, it is often

insufficient to provide policy control

solely at the infrastructure or VM

level. Enterprises require a broad

range of application-centric policy

types to control the deployment and

operation of applications and

platforms, as opposed to the relative

simplicity of bare underlying

infrastructure. Agility Platform

provides enterprises with the broad

range of application-centric policy

types including:

Access polic ies: Role-

based access to enterprise

cloud services including

federated identity

management.

Entitlement polic ies:

Limit user access to specific

assets types.

Deployment polic ies:

Limit deployment of

workloads and data to

authorized environments.

Storage Tier polic ies:

Limit deployment of data

to a storage tier with

appropriate service level.

Orchestration polic ies:

Apply multiple layers of

policies across assets and

services in order to enforce

Standard Operating

Environments.

Service Level

Agreement (SLA)

polic ies: Dynamically

scale-up and scale-down

applications based on

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compound auto-scaling

rules and threshholds,

either by adding instances

to a workload pool or by

resizing individual

instances.

Regulatory compliance

polic ies: Limit

deployment of workloads

to regulatory

compliant environments

(e.g. PCI, HIPAA, others).

Security polic ies:

Enforce security zone

compliance with policies

that configure firewalls,

embed third-party security

tools and utilities, and

more.

Lifecycle event

polic ies: Enforce policies

at events including SDLC

stages, third-party systems

events/notification, and

event correlations from

event streams.

Backup and failover

polic ies: Enforce high

availability and disaster

recovery policies.

Resource constraint

polic ies: Limit the

quantity of IT resources

consumed.

Lease and scheduling

polic ies: Limit the

duration and scheduling of

IT resources deployed.

Chargeback/metering

polic ies: Limit resource

consumption and meter

consumption based on

customizable pricing

models.

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Configuration

management polic ies:

Detect non-sanctioned

configuration changes and

reapply the approved

configuration along with

the appropriate

alerts/notifications.

Enterprise Cloud with ExtensiblePolicies

Agility Platform provides customers

a cloud management solution that

enables creation and enforcement of

an unlimited range of custom

policies. Our powerful enterprise

cloud platform offers an extensible

meta model, allowing you to create

new attributes that policies can

reference to make decisions.

Cloud Governance with Fine-Grain Policy Enforcement

Agility Platform enforces cloud

governance within a customizable

organizational hierarchy model,

making it quick and easy to enforce

concurrent policies at different

layers within an organization.

Cloud Governance for SDLCStages and Environments

Agility Platform’s cloud governance

Applic ation- c entric Polic ies (c lic k to

enlarge)

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policies natively recognize different

software development lifecycle

(SDLC) stages and events, and allow

for customized governance controls

as applications and their deployment

environment are promoted across

SDLC stages to support initiatives

around DevOps, Continuous Delivery

and others.

Dynamic, Declarative Policies

Agility Platform’s declarative policies

are easy to modify and maintain, and

simple to combine additively with

other policies at multiple

enforcement points. These flexible

policies are designed to respond to

real-time event correlations in

addition to use in approval workflows.

Visual Policy Editor forNon-Technical Staff

Agility Platform includes a drag-and-

drop visual policy editor that can be

used by IT Analysts and other roles

that lack programming knowledge,

making it easier to codify policy

controls from Business Units,

Corporate Compliance offices, and

other stakeholders. More

sophisticated users can toggle

between synchronized graphical and

Javascript/XML policy views as

desired.

End-to-End Cloud Security

Visual Polic y Editor (c lic k image to

enlarge)

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Adopting an enterprise cloud IT operating

model requires that cloud workloads and

environments operate as a trusted

extension of your organization. The Agility

Platform provides end-to-end cloud

security that leverages automated

security policies and zoned security

models to ensure comprehensive cloud

security and minimize/eliminate manual

configuration errors. This includes a wide

range of capabilities to secure and isolate

virtual networks, configure firewalls,

encrypt persistent data, harden machine

instances, leverage internal and external

encryption key stores, and enforce fine-

grain access controls.

Identity Management

Agility Platform incorporates

federated identity management to

allow organizations to leverage

existing authentication and

authorization directories for “single

sign-on” across the full range of

public and private cloud services

under Agility Platform cloud

management. This includes support

for Microsoft Active Directory, LDAP,

and SAML2.0.

Automate FirewallConfiguration Across Privateand Public Clouds

Agility Platform provides native

integration with a variety of virtual

Comprehensive Sec urity (c lic k image to

enlarge)

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and physical firewall products so that

you can consistently enforce a

workload’s security posture across

different heterogeneous private and

public clouds.

Application-Level UserPermissions Model

Agility Platform’s role-based access

controls encompass native

application-level permissions. For

example, existing application specific

permissions such as “User”, “Power

User”, or “Administrator” for MS SQL

Server, can be passed through

automatically to self-service

provisioning users. This improves

instance security, rather than

providing default root access to the

machine, and enable more

sophisticated IT services to be

offered on an automated, self-

service basis.

Application Portability,

Orchestration and

Configuration Management

Agility Platform enables cloud workloads

to be portable across a broad range of

heterogeneous public and private clouds.

This applies to cloud workload ranging

from simple stacks to the most complex,

multi-tier applications. Agility Platform

policy controls can be leveraged to

automate and optimize cloud workload

placement decisions based on costs,

geographic location, regulatory

constraints, and a wide range of other

parameters that ensure vendor

contestability and prevent lock-in.

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SCHEDULE A DEMO

Application-CentricOrchestration and Delivery

Agility Platform orchestrates the

deployment of complex, multi-tier

applications which can include

diverse components, load balancers,

firewalls, VPN appliances, virtual

networks, DHCP, dynamic DNS,

encryption key stores, persistent

data storage, registration with third-

party system, and much more.

Customizable Storage Tiers

Agility Platform enables the

configuration and management of

storage tiers, allowing Agility

Platform’s policy controls to align

cloud workloads to the most

appropriate storage resources to

optimize service levels, storage

utilization, and costs.

Configuration ManagementDetection and Remediation

Agility Platform continuously

monitors cloud applications and

platforms including the detection of

configuration changes. When a non-

sanctioned configuration change

occurs, Agility Platform uses policies

to enforce the appropriate

remediation action via configuration

management tools like Puppet and

Chef to reapply the approved

configuration, and/or send alerts and

notifications to third-party systems

Stateless Workload (c lic k image to

enlarge)

Agility Platform

Take-Aways

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and execute approval workflows.

Agility Platform has the ability to

correlate multiple disparate events

and take action, allowing for greater

insight into changes and more

sophisticated options for

remediation.

Portability Across Diverse Publicand Private Clouds

Agility Platform enables broad hybrid

cloud strategies with support for the

following cloud service providers:

VMware vCloud Director, VMware

vCenter, Microsoft System Center,

Microsoft Azure, Amazon EC2, Fujitsu,

Terremark, Savvis, CSC, OpenStack,

CloudStack, Rackspace, and

Eucalyptus.

Extend and Enhance Existing

IT Ecosystems

The Agility Platform integrates across a

robust ecosystem of third-party products

and service providers both within an

enterprise’s existing IT infrastructure, and

out to a variety of external cloud service

providers. This extended ecosystem helps

enable new cloud-based IT operating

models and is supported by several core

platform capabilities.

Clouds Supported (c lic k image to

enlarge)

Agility

Platform

Overview

479 kb PDF

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Comprehensive REST API

Customers use Agility Platform’s API

to access fully governed enterprise

cloud services from existing IT

products and tools; including

developer tools, continuous software

build tools, third-party portals, IT ops

dashboards, and more. Agility

Platform’s API is as full-featured as

the Agility Platform user interface

itself, and every capability exposed

via the API goes through the same

policy-driven IT governance and

security controls.

Cloud Adapter SDK

The Agility Platform SDK enables

customers and partners to rapidly

build their own cloud adapters to

govern and control IT resource

managers, including bare-metal

provisioning tools.

Command Line Interface

Agility Platform provides an intuitive

command line interface that enables

rapid DevOps toolchain integration.

In addition, technical users can use

the CLI to instruct the Agility

Platform to execute a wide range of

commands and function from the

convenience of a command line tool

rather than through the Agility

Platform graphical web interface.

Complex Event Processing

IT Ec osystem (c lic k image to enlarge)

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Agility Platform is designed to

capture a broader array of real-time

events and respond with pre-

programmed notifications and

responses – either within Agility

Platform or to third-party offerings.

This enables a wide range of

responses to changing application

needs, such as updating CMDBs,

automating ticket submission into

incident management systems,

activating third-party application

performance management tools to

gather detailed forensics, or simply

using email and SNMP to generate

custom alerts when monitoring

thresholds are exceeded.

Workflow Automation

Agility Platform provides workflow

automation capabilities to

streamline application migration

planning and approvals, and software

release automation and approvals

across SDLC tool chains.

Vendor Contestability

The Agility Platform provides vendor

contestability for enterprise customers by

abstracting the technical and operational

differences between heterogeneous

cloud providers into a single control point

for orchestration, governance, and

lifecycle management. Agility Platform’s

centralized reporting enables monitoring

Streamlined Toolc hain Workflow (c lic k

image to enlarge)

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and auditing of cloud provider

performance, and Agility Platform’s

cloud-portable blueprints support on-

demand price comparisons between cloud

providers and allow enterprises to make

policy-based deployment optimization

decisions based on multiple parameters.

An Integrated, Purpose-Built

Platform

The Agility Platform minimizes

operational complexity by providing a

centralized governance, orchestration

and management control point over

broad IT service portfolios deployed across

heterogeneous private and public clouds.

The Agility Platform is also built on a

cloud-native architecture that

dynamically scales to meet system

demand, using only the amount of

resources needed.

Cloud workload portability

Agility Platform’s cloud-portable

application blueprints enable

enterprises to create a single

blueprint and deploy it across

heterogeneous private and public

clouds. This portability helps drive

vendor contestability and policy-

based optimization of deployment

decisions based upon cost,

performance, or other parameters.

Embed IT standards in theblueprint design and modelingprocess

The Agility Platform enables

enterprise IT to create and enforce

standards during the blueprint design

and modeling process. This includes

embedding IT Ops best practices for

the governance and configuration of

deployment environments, and

defining standard operating

environments with software

packages and scripts assembled by

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default into the desired blueprints.

Configuration management policies

ensure that these standards are

maintained throughout the

application lifecycle.

Asset version control andchange tracking

Enterprises require full control over

changes to cloud blueprints, stacks,

policies, configurations, and

instances, along with the ability to

track and approve changes. The

Agility Platform includes governed

change-control and version tracking

of assets within cloud environments.

Self-updating blueprints andtemplates

Cloud applications and platforms are

based on underlying virtual machine

designs that can change based on

updates or patches to operating

systems, utilities, agents, scripts, and

other software packages. When a

change is made to an underlying

design component, it can be

automatically updated to all the

dependent application blueprints

that rely on it. This helps eliminate

configuration drift, ensures

compliance and standardization

across the enterprise, and

significantly reduces artifact sprawl

and design complexity.

Supports tens of thousands ofworkloads with a single instance

The Agility Platform has been proven

to support the concurrent

provisioning and management of

tens of thousands of workloads with

one Agility Platform instance.

Organizations can also deploy

multiple instances of the Agility

Platform as desired.

Distributed Reporting

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Architecture

Agility Platform’s distributed

reporting architecture dramatically

reduces report creation time and

bandwidth consumption. This is

especially useful when aggregating

reports over thousands of workloads

and environments where users are

charged for network bandwidth.

Traditional aggregate report

collection methods become costly

and unresponsive at these volumes.

Next Steps: Planner

Distributed Reporting (c lic k image to

enlarge)

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